Hello everyone, I thought I would post a quick apology regarding the recent spam which has flooded the forums.

You may have seen them flooding the board a few times. Although we have not yet been able to put in place a spam blocker - we have tracked down the culprit, a Mr Sama Kahnah Carine from Douala, Cameroon. I am sorry if you came on the boards during his 'attack'.

Although we have found out this particular individuals identity and will be dealing with it accordingly - I'd just like to remind everyone about disclosing personal details on line. Even if you were ever inclined to break international law by purchasing a fake passport - its highly unlikely you'd get one from a gentleman in Cameron posing as an American businessman!

DanielRR - 2012-11-22 2:29 PM Hello everyone, I thought I would post a quick apology regarding the recent spam which has flooded the forums. You may have seen them flooding the board a few times. Although we have not yet been able to put in place a spam blocker - we have tracked down the culprit, a Mr Sama Kahnah Carine from Douala, Cameroon. I am sorry if you came on the boards during his 'attack'. Although we have found out this particular individuals identity and will be dealing with it accordingly - I'd just like to remind everyone about disclosing personal details on line. Even if you were ever inclined to break international law by purchasing a fake passport - its highly unlikely you'd get one from a gentleman in Cameron posing as an American businessman! Thanks for your patience! Daniel

muffy - 2012-11-27 3:06 PM We have Enjoy Russian spamming the boards, while on the face of it they are a legitimate business do they really need upteen threads to tell us about it.

AND it make it difficult to find a particular thread if needed.....

Indeed, although it has proven to be a blessing in disguise, as I need to get my wife to update her Gumtree ad offering Russian Lessons in the Edinburgh area independently and its dropped off Gumtree
She is also a freelancer for two other organisations offering Russian Language lessons in Edinburgh.

Someone suggested a while back that on joining your first post had to be moderated before it was listed. A bit of work for someone, but less frustrating than having to search through for the SPAM.

I would have had no objection if that was the rules when I joined - and some of those with the more exotic coloured stars seem to be willing to undertake a bit of light lifting in support of the integrity of the forum.

I think the only rule for the moderator is that as long as it is not SPAM you get through.

The problem is that the software this forum runs on (MegaBBS) isn't very sophisticated as far as anti-spam features go compared to other more widely used forum software such as IP.Board, phpBB or vBulletin. I run an IP.Board forum and have managed to do quite a good job of keeping the spammers out with the built in options plus some additional custom coding.

The only useful anti-spam measure that can be used from the built-in options in MegaBBS is to require admin approval of every single member registration (rather than an automated email being sent out for self-verification of a registration), however this can be a very tedious and time consuming task and not something I would really want to have to do if I was an administrator.

There are a few standard ways to try and keep spammers registering and posting on a forum, some of which are actually automated bots and not real people and these tend to be the easiest ones to keep out. Options include using a reCAPTCHA image on the registration page and/or asking a specific question that a bot won't know how to answer. However, neither of these are out-of-the-box options in MegaBBS so some customisation would have to be made to the ASP code in order to implement these kind of features. I'm a software developer by trade so it's something I could possibly look into if it would be deemed usefual and worth the effort.

For the time being I think we will just have to put up with the spam and rely on the moderators manually deleting any as and when it appears.

Of the 4 moderators on here, Nick hasn't logged on since the beginning of August, Tony only logs on a few times a week these days, Chris is probably busy most of the time with more important things like trying to run RR, and the new(ish) moderator (Bridgette RR) who I assume is a RR staff member hasn't logged on for two weeks. I've reported at least 10 spam posts since last week but they're still sitting there clogging up the boards unfortunately.

It would be good to know if these are manual spammers or bots because the latter should be fairly easy to keep out with some additional features added to the registration screen.